10 Reasons Why I am Addicted to My Sauna: Part Two

Contact SoCal Sauna at 951-741-1048 and please visit our website at www.socalsauna.com for a NO COST consultation to make sure you get the right sauna! 

Ben Greenfield writes:

In Part One of this two-part article series, you learned five big reasons I'm addicted to sauna and heat therapy, including muscle gain, fat loss, joint pain management, detoxification, heart heath and longevity. Let's delve into the final five reasons you should start sweating more.

6. Immune System Boost

Sure, you may get snot in your sauna if you step in there when you're sick, but you also may get better faster. The Journal of Human Kinetics recently investigated the effect of sauna use on the immune system, specifically white blood cell profile, cortisol levels and selected physiological indices in athletes and non-athletes. The subjects from both a sauna group and control group participated in 15-minute sauna sessions until their core temperature rose by 1.2°C.

After the sauna session, an increased number of white blood cells, lymphocyte, neutrophil and basophil counts was reported in the white blood cell profile, showing that sauna use stimulates the immune system (and interestingly, a greater benefit to the immune system was shown in the athletes vs. the untrained subjects, indicating that an excellent one-two combo for your immune system is exercise and sauna use).German sauna medical research also shows that saunas are able to significantly reduce the incidences of colds and influenza and both Finnish and German studies show that regular sauna bathing leads to a 30 percent less chance of getting a cold and influenza.

7. Skin Rejuvenation

While exposing yourself to ungodly amounts of time in the sun can make your skin look like Benjamin Button as a baby, the old lady in "Something About Mary", or an elephant who spent too much time a bathtub, spending time in a sauna doesn't submit you to the same kind of UVA and UVB rays as you get from the sun. When your body begins to produce sweat via the type deep sweating you experience in an infrared sauna, the rate at which dead skin cells are replaced an be increased. At the same time, heavy sweating helps to remove bacteria out of the epidermal layer of the skin and the sweat ducts.

This cleansing of the pores also causes increased capillary circulation, which can give the skin a softer-looking, younger appearance. When you sweat, the movement of fluid to the skin delivers more nutrient and mineral-rich fluids and also helps to fill spaces around the cells, increasing firmness and reducing the appearance of wrinkles. So by continually flushing waste through skin cells via the use of hyperthermia, you can increase skin health, tone and color, and with cleansing pores. Not only does research show this to be the case, but I'll admit that I'm quite frequently mistaken as Justin Bieber when I take a stroll down the street after my morning sauna session. So it must be working.

8. Better Sleep

Next time you find yourself struggling with a bout of insomnia, try this trick: about two to three hours before bed, hunt down a gym sauna and get your sweat on for about fifteen to thirty minutes. Next, hop in a lukewarm or cool shower for five to ten minutes to bring your body temp down. If you've got plenty of time on your hands, you can do this two to three times through. Anytime I do this kind of hot-cold contrast in the evening, I sleep like a baby.

Researchers have found that a sauna can help provide a deeper, more relaxed sleep, and also relief of chronic tension, and relief of chronic fatigue issues, most likely due to a release of endorphins from the sauna. As endorphins are released into your body, they create a soothing, nearly tranquilizing effect that can not only help to minimize chronic pain caused by arthritis and other muscle soreness, but can also help with relaxation and sleep. For an even more enhanced effect, try deep nasal breathingwhile you're in there.

9. Increased Cardiovascular Performance

You probably know of EPO as the illegal performance-enhancing drug made famous by professional cyclists in Tour De France, but research has shown 30 minutes of sauna treatment after exercise can cause an increase in oxygen consumption and red blood cell production that parallels the use of EPO. That's right: no needles in the right butt cheek or illegal performance enhancing drugs required. In the high temperatures of an infrared sauna, your skin heats up and core body temperature rises. Then, in response to these increased heat levels, the blood vessels near your skin dilate and cause an increase in cardiac output. This causes your heart rate to shoot up from 60-70 bpm (beats per minute) to as high as over 150 bpm in the sauna. So with regular sauna use, you not only train your heart muscles and improve your cardiac output, but you also help the body's regulatory system move blood around the body to areas that need cooling.

Similar to the pre-sleep protocol mentioned earlier, you can enhance this cardiovascular conditioning even more when your sauna is combined with alternating sessions into a cool shower, a quick dip into a cold pool or lake, or if you're lazy like me, a step into your backyard to shower yourself down with a garden hose. Each time you rapidly change temperature (from hot to cool or vice-versa), your heart rate increases by as much as 60 percent, which is very comparable to the heart rate increase experienced during moderate exercise. And in case you've heard the rumors: yes, many folks find this to be a potent treatment for hangovers too.

10. Increased Stress Resilience

There's a good reason that best-selling author Nassim Taleb recommendsenvironmental stressors as a way to become more "Antifragile". As mentioned earlier,multiple research studies have shown that hyperthermia conditioning via the use of a sauna can prevent protein degradation and muscle loss by triggering the production of heat shock proteins (HSPs), which are then used by your cells to counteract potentially harmful stimulus, including environmental stress from pollutants, toxins, heat, cold, exercise stress and more.

Whenever a cell is exposed to an unfriendly environment, your DNA "separates" in specific regions and begins to read the genetic code to produce new stress proteins, including these HSPs. What this means is that exposure to sauna heat can induce a hormetic response (a protective stress response), which promotes the production of HSPs that are crucial to stress resistance, prevention of free radical damage, support of cellular antioxidant capacity and repair of damaged proteins. Dr. Rhonda Patrick talks about these HSPs quite a bit in our podcast episode on heat therapy and saunas.

So, can you blame me? I'm addicted to my sauna, and knowing everything you've just read, I feel very good about myself when I walk out of my daily sauna session. If you're up for the challenge, I'd recommend that for the next thirty days, you try the Finnish practice of visiting a sauna four to five times a week for twenty to thirty minutes. Let me know how that works out for you.

10 Reasons Why I am Addicted to My Sauna: Part One

Contact SoCal Sauna at 951-741-1048 and please visit our website at www.socalsauna.com for a NO COST consultation to make sure you get the right sauna! 

We love seeing stories of how much people love their home saunas, especially when published in a popular publication.

Two notes:

1. We don't necessarily recommend exercising while in the sauna, especially kettle bell swing or other potentially intense workouts. A workout before, after, or in between sessions is great.

2. Sauna doesn't have to be a time of solitude. Yes, it is peaceful and relaxing, but something we often miss in our North American view of sauna is the great social time that can be had while in sauna. Share the sauna experience with family and friends.

Ben Greenfield writes:

I have a confession to make: I'm an addict.

Every morning I wipe the crust out of the corner of my eyes, suck down a giant cup of coffee, and then wander to my basement gym, where I commence to flip the power on my sauna. I step inside, and sweat hard and heavy for 15 to 30 minutes. Sometimes I do yoga, sometimes I do kettlebell swings, sometimes I simply stare at the wall and meditate, but always I feel pangs of guilt, desire and an intense urge to go sweat if I ever miss my daily sauna session.

On the rare morning that I can't find time to sauna, I carve out time in the afternoon or evening (usually after my workout, for reasons you're about to read).

It's been nearly 45 days since I've missed a single sauna session.

So yes, there, I admit it: I am a sauna addict. Knowing that I can venture downstairs and enter into a private chamber that gives my body a myriad of benefits simply makes a sauna sit a daily must for me.

Why the sauna? Am I a heat masochist? Addicted to sweating? An introverted loner who thrives on staring at wooden wall slats as my heart races faster and faster to rapidly pump blood through my body in desperate attempts to keep me cool?

Frankly, there are many reasons I "sauna". 10, in fact. In no particular order of importance here they are:

1. Heart Health and Longevity

A new report in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that regularly spending time in a sauna may help keep the heart healthy and extend life. Researchers from the University of Eastern Finland tracked 2,300 middle-aged men for an average of 20 years. The men spent an average of around 15 minutes per sauna visit, and over the course of the study, 49 percent of men who went to a sauna once a week died, compared with 38 percent of those who went two to three times a week and just 31 percent of those who went four to seven times a week.

Frequent visits to a sauna were also associated with lower death rates from cardiovascular disease and stroke. Researchers reported that this was likely due to the decrease in blood pressure and an increase in blood vessel diameter that both infrared exposure and heat exposure can provide.

Having spent time last month in Finland sitting buck-naked in a traditional Finnish smoke sauna, surrounded by old guys who definitely seemed more ripped and vibrant than their fat Western counterparts, I can certainly attest to the fact that there's something special going on with this Finnish tradition.

2. Detoxification Of Chemicals And Heavy Metals

The skin is a major detox organ, and sweating through the skin is a critical human detox function, yet most people don't sweat regularly or enough. Think detoxing is a woo-woo, airy-fairy, pushing-giant-shopping-carts-full-of-kale-through-Whole-Foods myth? Think again. You may want to read this.

As you'll see if you read that article above, the body is very effective at eliminating toxins via the skin (and the liver, and the poo), but the skin side of things only really works if you make your body sweat. But many of us sit in air-conditioned indoor environments all day, and even gyms with temperature control can be a tough place to work up a serious sweat. So in these type of situations, you completely miss out on a major source of toxin elimination: the skin.

To combat these effects, a sauna can purify the body from the inside out, eliminating compounds such as PCB's, metals and toxins that are stored in fat cells, which can undergo lipolysis and release toxins upon exposure to infrared-based heat. Yep, you read that right: you are going to battle against and killing little screaming fat cells to death when you sweat in a sauna. They don't shrink: they die (especially when combined with niacin, which research has some interesting findings on and which I talk about in more detail here).

3. Athletic Recovery

Growth hormone is crucial for repair and recovery of muscles, and research has shown that two 20-minute sauna sessions separated by a 30-minute cooling period elevated growth hormone levels two-fold over baseline. Two 15-minute sauna sessions at an even warmer temperature separated by a 30-minute cooling period resulted in a five-fold increase in growth hormone.

Perhaps even more nifty is that repeated exposure to whole-body, intermittent hyperthermia through sauna use boosts growth hormone immediately afterward, and two one-hour sauna sessions for seven days has been shown to increase growth hormone by 16-fold. Yeah, that's right: you don't need to go buy fancy supplements or creams to increase growth hormone. You can just make your body hot instead and get a growth hormone increase

It is also important to note that when hyperthermia and exercise are combined, they induce a synergistic increase in growth hormone, which is why I do yoga, push-ups and squats in my infrared sauna. For an additional recovery benefit, sauna alsoincreases blood flow to the skeletal muscles, which helps to keep them fueled with glucose, amino acids, fatty acids, and oxygen, while removing by-products of metabolic processes such as lactic acid and calcium ions.

4. Arthritic and Muscular Pain Relief

In a report in The Annals of Clinical Research Volume 20, Dr. H. Isomäki discusses research results that show benefits of sauna for relief of pain and increased mobility. In the study, the pain relief induced by a sauna was attributed to an increase in the release of have anti-inflammatory compounds such as noradrenaline, adrenaline, cortisol and growth hormones, as well as an increase in positive stress on the body, causing it to releases natural pain-killing endorphins. More than 50 percent of participants reported temporary relief of pain and an increase in mobility, most likely due to the fact that tissues comprised of collagen, such as tendons, fascia, and joint articular capsules, become more flexible when exposed to increased temperatures.

Now here's the deal: I don't actually have arthritis. But I do have some pretty freaking gnarly joint pain the day after I've finished a typical workout of heavy squats, sandbag carries, kettlebell swings, hill sprints and tire flips. After my morning sauna session, things seem to melt away (caveat: I have not yet used myself as a N=1control study by sitting and staring at a wooden wall in normal, non-sauna temperatures, but I'm hazarding a guess it wouldn't work as well as a sauna, so I'll skip that study, because it sounds boring).

5. Muscle Gain and Fat Loss

Bigger biceps or a more toned butt by reading a magazine while sweating profusely? It could happen. Sauna conditioning can lend itself to promoting muscle growth and fat loss by improving insulin sensitivity and decreasing muscle protein catabolism. Intermittent hyperthermia has been shown to reduce insulin resistance in obese mice, and in this case insulin resistant diabetic mice were subjected to 30 minutes of heat treatment, three times a week for twelve weeks. The results were a 31 percent decrease in insulin levels and a significant reduction in blood glucose levels, both of which can contribute to an increase in muscle growth and an increase in weight control and fat loss.

It has also been shown that a 30-minute intermittent hyperthermic treatment can cause a significant expression of something called heat shock proteins in muscle, which is correlated with 30 percent more muscle regrowth than a control group during seven days subsequent to a week of immobilization. In other words, let's say you can't weight train, you've got a recovery day or you want to maintain muscle but you're injured. Based on the research cited above, via the use of a sauna instead, you can still maintain muscle.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this series, in which you're going to discover five more reasons I'm a sauna addict, and why you should be too. In the meantime, what are you waiting for? Find a sauna and get your sweat on!

Can a sauna increase the value of my home?

Contact SoCal Sauna at 951-741-1048 and please visit our website at www.socalsauna.com for a NO COST consultation to make sure you get the right sauna!

Does a sauna add value to my home?

As with so many home improvements, the answer to the above question is, ‘Well, that depends.”

Saunas are certainly very popular and rightly so. A sauna will help you relax; it can be part of your healthy lifestyle or social whirl. Saunas are generally good to look at and cheap to run. They need very little maintenance and yes, they carry with them a certain European cache that most people find attractive.

There is certainly something very appealing about having a sauna in your own home.

Having said that, they are also rather personal and your ‘perfect sauna’ may not appeal to everyone.

Location, location, location.

There is a classic estate agents rule of thumb that you cannot improve any properties value significantly above the ceiling of its particular area. That means, country estate or terraced cottage, there will be a maximum price that anyone is prepared to pay for a house in that particular location and no matter how many luxurious home improvements you put in, you’ll never get above that price.

The other aspect of the location question is, where in your house have you put your sauna?

For instance, you might think that tucking a sauna away in the cupboard under the stairs was a neat and clever plan. For a lot of people, it might be a little off-putting.

If your sauna fits comfortably and elegantly into your home, and your house looks like the type of place that could or should have a sauna then it will certainly be an asset in getting people interested in your property.

Adding value.

One thing to remember about saunas is that they need not be that expensive and they are reasonably quick and easy to fit. One of the reasons that bathrooms and kitchens are so important to selling a house is that they are expensive to replace and almost more importantly, the trauma and upheaval of having them replaced or refurbished is something that everyone is keen to avoid. So they pay the premium not to have to do just that.

If you are thinking of installing a sauna in your home then obviously the better thought out and designed it is and the better quality it is then the more impact it might have on your property price.

Perhaps more importantly it will add value to your home while you are still living there. Your sauna is a perfect way to relax at the end of a hard day, a perfect setting for weekend socialising with friends or family and one of the best ways there is of feeling truly clean and healthy in the midst of this hectic, bustling world.